During the trial, the jury heard how Colin Gray had bought his son an AR-style rifle for Christmas the year before the attack, even though the boy had been questioned by police just seven months earlier about online threats to commit a school shooting. [More]
The AR reference is a bit of hyperbolic hand-wringing because there’d be just as much outrage over a Fudd gun being used, but there is a point here that merits discussion– when you know something is wrong and you enable it anyway, you do share culpability in outcomes.
Denial is one thing, and it’s understandable when admitting it can be so overwhelmingly devastating, but the fact that it is is your first clue. Those of us who have had to make tough decisions in child-raising that ultimately resulted in successful adult outcomes should thank God we were never faced with having to confront a child so broken he could not be fixed.
And if one of mine had been taken from me because his father was too weak to confront reality, I’d blame him, too.
[Via bondmen]
While your point is well taken, it is hard to gauge from the article how much evidence the father had that the kid might truly go homicidal, versus just a kid mouthing off.
Basically the father was prosecuted because he is a white man. The system will NEVER prosecute any of its favored minorities in similar circumstances, such as an inner-city black gangbanger’s mother.